> Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's?

Late last year I switched from a 1.5tb Optane 905P to a 4tb WD Blue SN5000 NVMe drive in a gaming machine and saw improved load times, which makes sense given the read and write speeds are ~double. No observable difference otherwise.

I'm sure that's not the use case you were looking for. I could probably tease out the difference in latency with benchmarks but that's not how I use the computer.

The 905P is now in service as an SSD cache for a large media server and that came with a big performance boost but the baseline I'm comparing to is just spinning drives.

▲

exmadscientist 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately a gaming machine workload is so read-heavy that I wouldn't expect Optane to square up well. Gaming is all about read speed and overall capacity. You need that heavy I/O mix, especially with low latency deadlines, to see gains from Optane. That limited target use case, coupled with ignorant benchmarking, always limited them.

▲

rkagerer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks, that's helpful real-world feedback (not that I wouldn't also be interested in some synthetic benchmark comparisons from someone else).

	▲	aggieNick02 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We benchmarked three of the popular Optane NVMe SSDs about three years ago. There was a short window when they were on clearance and a popular choice as a cache SSD in TrueNAS. https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/425127-benchmarking-op... You can compare their benchmarks with the other almost 400 SSDs we've benchmarked. Most impressive is that three years later they are still the top random read QD1 performers, with no traditional flash SSD coming anywhere close: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/benchm... They are amazing for how consistent and boring their performance is. Bit level access means no need for TRIM or garbage collection, performance doesn't degrade over time, latency is great, and random IO is not problematic.